Joshua Tolley

Josh Tolley is a System and Application Administrator in Salt Lake City who appreciates the value of images when studying the performance of a system. He can be found fiddling in front of Linux boxen at work, OpenBSD boxen at home, and in the kitchen or playing with the kids when returning to the real world. Particular areas of interest include data visualization, data mining, formal verification of programs, and traditional nutrition, because they seem useful and he finds he knows very little about all four.

I've been using various FOSS packages since discovering the free software world in 2001 or so, and have gradually expanded my use of it ever since, always hoping never to have to turn back. Having some experience as a programmer, though no remarkable talent to speak of, I've wanted to contribute ever since, and particularly to contribute code; only recently have I found available time and a project of particular interest appearing simultaneously in the form of pgsnmpd. I tend toward the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none philosophy, meaning I don't end up particularly good at anything specific beyond learning well independently and aggregating that knowledge into something useful for a specific task. Examples of this aggregation include the system used to monitor and manage application performance for the U.S. Dept. of Defense EMALL project, the largest e-commerce system operated by the U.S. government, and source of my current employment. It's my day job to make sure it keeps running as well as possible, to which end I've managed to draw on experience networking, programming, securing systems, monitoring systems, visualizing data, dealing with politics, and managing projects that has resulted in fairly significant performance and ease-of-use increases. I hope eventually to be able to spend my time helping the uninitiated make use of FOSS software.